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Spark by John Ratey - Chapter 1
Spark by John Ratey - Chapter 1
feen^S' in International
kvfatees knowledge of
tm|iH;!hina, Japan, and
plfeese'crucial subjects,
on a slight swell of land west of Chicago stands a brick build
Ij^giting^as Naperville's
icjtiilialded withsadnews
lieying adolescents,
lays out the morning's assignment: "OK, once you're done with
your warm-up, we're going to head out to the track and run the
mile" he says, presenting a black satchel full of chest straps and
digital watchesheart rate monitors of the type used by avid ath
letes to gauge their physical exertion. "Every time you go around
the track, hit the red button. What that's going to doit's going
to give you a split. It's going to tell you, this is how fast I did my first
lap, second lap, third lap. On the fourth and final lapwhich will
be just as fast if you do it right" he says, pausing to survey his
sleepy charges, "you hit the blue button, OK? And that'll stop your
watch. Your goal iswell, to try to run your fastest mile. Last but
not least,youraverage heart rate should be above 185."
Welc
SPARK
i$;'"Nine minutes."
hit the track under the mottled skies of a crisp October morning.
This is notgood old gym class. This is Zero Hour PE, the latest
in a long line ofeducational experiments conducted by a group of
maverick physical education teachers who have turned the nine
the nationand also someof the smartest..(The name of the class
"My watch isn't reading," says one ofthe boys as hejogs past.
"Red button," shouts Duncan. "Hit the red button! At the end,
hit the blue button."
Two girls named Michelle and Krissy pass by, shuffling along
side by side.
A kid with unlaced skateboarding shoes finishes his laps and
turns in his watch. His time reads eight minutes, thirty seconds.
Next comes a husky boy in baggy shorts.
10
;jiv"Nice work."
refers to its scheduled time before first period.) The objective ofZero
Hour isto determine whether working out before school gives these
kids a boost in reading ability and in the rest oftheir subjects.
The notion that it might is supported by emerging research
showing that physical activity sparks biological changes that en
courage brain cells to bind to one another. For the brain to learn,
^;!'Tlat?"
^*Yeah."
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Welcome to the Revolution
"Nine minutes."
"Flat?"
"Yeah."
^ffeted by a group of
$$fIheobjective ofZero
fefepsehool gives these
&$d$0ek subjects.
;ei!y/(emterging research
iMfiliteferain's fundamen-
eiflBijgygscientists discover
i^lactScercise provides an
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^Iffbtential.
I^ectacled Mr. Duncan
fe boys ashe jogs past,
tared button! At the end,
brts.
"Nice work."
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SPARK
pjaxtieularly sincersta!
whitethey're stilliinsS!
'Mfew PE curriculum!!
AsheyJstiUfeel^^^
expected, the second-period literacy class performs best. The
ifeieffectshave showl
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Sve junior highs,: an]
;j0B, let's look atMara
FIRST-CLASS PERFORMANCE
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Welcome!
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TIMSS has beenadministered every four years since 1995. The
1999 editionincluded 230,000 studentsfrom thirty-eight countries,
59,000 of whom were from the United States. While New Trier
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97 percent ofits eighth graders took the testnot merely the best
and the brightest. How did they stack up? On the science section
of the TIMSS, Naperville's students finished first, just ahead of
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scoring dead last inscience and math, respectively. "We have huge
discrepancies among our school districts inthe United States," says
Ina Mullis, who is a codirector of TIMSS. "It's a good thing that
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going bankrupt."
suggests that the parents of many Naperville kids are highly edu
really stand out: its unusual brand ofphysical education and its test
14
^effiographically advantaged
|fii!^ly//2'j6 percent in the low
gtQienJE in that range for Illikfast;a 97 percent graduation
sate science-centric compa-
THE NEW PE
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baseball team and served as the district coordinator for PE, but
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When Lawler and his staffat Madison tooka close look at what
was happening in gym, they saw alot of inactivity. It's the nature of
team sports: waiting for a turn at bat, waiting for thecenter's snap,
waiting for the soccer ball to come your way. Most of the time,
most of the players just stood around. So Lawler decided to shift
run the mile. Every single week! His decision met with groans from
students, complaints from parents, and notes from doctors.
He was undeterred, yet he quickly recognized that the grading
scale discouraged theslowest runners. To offer nonathletes ashot at
bikes and allowed students to earn extra credit. They could come
in on their own time and ride five miles to raise their grades. "So
any kid who wanted toget an A could get an A ifheworked for it,"
Lawler explains. "Somewhere in this process, we got into personal
bests. Anytime you got a personal best, no matter what it was, you
moved up a letter grade." And this led to the founding principle of
the approach he dubbed the New PE: Students would be assessed
on effort rather than skill. You didn't have to be a natural athlete
to do well in gym.
But how does one judge the individual effort of forty kids at
a time? Lawler found his answer at a physical education confer
ence he organized every spring. He worked hard to turn the event
intoan exchange offresh ideas and technologies, and to encourage
attendance he talked the vendors into donating door prizes. Each
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heart rate monitor, which at the time was worth hundreds of dol
lars. He couldn't help himself; he stole it for the revolution. "I saw
that sonofa buck," he freely admits, "and Isaid, That's a door prize
girl who was thin but not the least bit athletic. When Lawlerdown
plugging away pretty close to full tilt. "When she crossed the finish
line, she went upto 207," Lawler continues. "Ding, ding, -ding! Isaid,
You gotta be kidding me! Normally, I would have gone to that girl
andsaid, You need togetyour ass ingear, little lady! It was really that
moment that caused dramatic changes in our overall program. The
heart rate monitors were a springboard for everything. 1 started
thinking back to all the kids we must have turned off to exercise
because we weren't able to give them credit. I didn't have an athlete
the students are constantly moving. "We still play sports," Lawler
says. "We just do them within a fitness model." Instead of being
tested on such trivia as the dimensions of a regulation volleyball
court, Naperville's gym students are graded on how much time they
spend in their target heart ratezones during anygiven activity.
"We developed the program not knowing what we were doing,"
Lawler says. And yet, the New PE has managed to put into practice
17
Welcome
SPARK
principles consistent with all the new research about exercise and
the brain.
delivery. He has the presence of Mike Ditka and Bill Parcells rolled
exercise and the brain. They learned by grilling speakers from the
conferences Lawler organized, attending sports physiology semi
ANEWSTEREOfj
her a stack of the latest brain research homework from the gym
ever been.
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That is why I was so inspip
teacher.
18
IpCH
Icty/teyesand afacts-is-facts
was a natural way to do that. But I also think the sheer size of the
t&utlientarski, Naperville
ifitness-nOt-sports message,
ever been.
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SPARK
Welcome
The first time 1visited, it was justbefore school letout for the sum
mer, but you wouldn't have known that by watching gym class at
Madison Junior High. There must have been thirty kids jumping
NaperviUe."
around with the sort of energy and enthusiasm you would only
expect tosec at thebeginning oftheschool year: lining up toget on
the climbing wall, arguing about who was going to get to use a new
exercise bike attached to a video-game monitor, running wildly on
who was obese. It's amazing. Their percentages of body fat were
way below national norms using the CDC's height and weight
percentiles, respectively.
their fitness is so far off the scale that it can't be just because it's
Naperville."
But what, exactly, do we know about the effectof gym on GPA?
Few researchers have tackled the question,although one study from
Virginia Tech showed that cutting gym class and allocating more
time to math, science, and reading did not improve test scores, as
so many school administrators assume it will. Because gym class
can mean so many things, research in this area has focused on the
correlation between physical fitness and academic achievement.
The most telling studies come from the California Department
of Education (CDE). Over the past five years, the CDE has con
sistently shown that students with higher fitness scores also have
higher test scores.
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Mr
21
SPARK
Welcome
of living scored better on the academic tests, but the results also
gests that although parents may not have immediate control over
their financial situations, they can improve their kids' chances of
performing well by encouraging them to get in shape. Exercise
could break the cycle.
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He leads the way, moving through the hallways with the delib
erate stride of a seasoned U-boat commander. At the first stop,
extend far beyond concerns about their students' body mass index.
"I tell people it's not my job as a PE teacher to make kids fit,"
Zientarski says. "My job is to make them know all of the things
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SPARK
with factors like blood pressure and cholesterol levels, along with
{
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nois at Urbana-Champa
Zientarski leads his group into the old girl's gym to show off
FitnessGram measures, i
24
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fisheifrown fitness plans. It's
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recruited for a given task. "We see better integrity there," Hillman
25
SPARK
Welcom
ter of interest is the one in the middle; the subject hits one button
when it's an H and another button when it's an S. When something
like HHSHH shows up, at the rate of once a second, it's easy to
make a mistake, and you know as soon as you've done so. What
Hillman found, he says, is that "fit kids slow down and make sure
they get that next one right." The ability to stop and consider a
response, to use the experience of a wrong choice as a guide in
making the next decision, relates to executive function, which is
controlled by an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. (I'll
explore executive function in subsequent chapters, especially when
we get to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which is partly
caused by a lapse in the prefrontal cortex. If a child with ADHD
took the flanker test, she would hit the wrong button before being
able to stop herself, or hesitate too long to hit the right button. But
you can imagine how much all of us rely on executive function.)
Learning from our mistakes isprofoundly important in everyday life,
andHillman's study shows that exerciseor at least the resulting fit
ness levelscan have a powerful impact on that fundamental skill.
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JessieWolfrum. Aself-described
rather than engage with other kids, Jessie had been shy all her life.
"In third grade, my mom gave me the option of piano or soccer,"
Jessie recalls, laughing about it now. "I was so scared of the idea of
hanging out with a bunch of girls at something I probably wasn't
going to be good at that I picked something I didn't even like. I
played piano for eight years!"
Ofcourse, Phil Lawler didn't give her the piano option when she
arrivedasa student at Madison Junior High.Jessie had to participate,
just like everyone else, and although she didn't much care for gym,
it wasn't too terriblecertainly not traumatizing. And she learned
lessons about her body that would serve her for years to come.
When she and her sister, Becky, moved on to Central, their
divergent class schedules meant they weren't able to constantly
lean on each other, so Jessie was forced to talk to other kids more
often than she felt comfortable doing. She signed up for speech
class to deal with her social anxiety, but she sayswhat really helped
her blossom was enrolling in kayaking. Jessie took to this skillintensive sport immediately, and discovering she was good at some
thing outside the academic realm helped transform her.
"If somebody notices that you're doing something that they
can't do, you get some attention," Jessie says. "In kayaking, people
started to notice me, and then I wasn't the person who faded into
the wallpaper. It made me more adventurous. Even if you're shy, if
somebody is like, How do you do that? you forget that you're shy,
and you just explain it: you have to turn your head this way or do
that with your paddle."
The swimming pool leveled the playing field in other ways too.
"Once everybody changes into their swimsuits, you can't tell who's
in the popular group," she says. "The class totally jumped those
boundaries of social standings. 1 had a lot of problems with that
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SPARK
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first thing he did was separate Jessie and her twinand all ofthe
other inseparable cliques. The leadership students learn to rock
tion. She joined the Adventure Club, a sort of ad hoc Zero Hour
for kids who wanted to come in at 6:30 in the morning to get extra
climb, and it's this sport in particular that captured Jessie's atten
BEYC
recalls Jessie. "We walked into the classroom, and we were theonly
work out, I wish I did. Every time I know that a whole bunch of
tests are coming upwhen I'm really stressed outI think, OK,
28
exercise ameliorates.
iddifor kayaking,
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you know how to handle this. It's definitely a relief to know that I
have something to fall back on. If I didn't have that, I'd probably
just go eat or something. But I know that exercise will spike up my
brain activity, and so I think, Just go do it. I wouldn't know that if
it weren't for my gym class."
BEYOND FITNESS
i'tdp-notch results,
Like many people, I grew up thinking that gym was a joke. We had
some fun, but, to my recollection, phys ed wasn't especially educa
tional. As an adult, when I began lecturing to teachers and doctors
about the positive impact of physical activity on mood, attention,
self-esteem, and social skills, I certainly wasn't thinking of gym as
the antidote. In my experience, PE wasn't really about exercise.
Quite the oppositeit discouraged exercise. The cruel irony was
that the shy, the clumsy, the out of shapesome of the kids who
could most benefitfrom exercisewere pushed aside to sit on the
bleachers. Someone like Jessie Wolfrum would have been margin
alized and left to stewin her shame.Over the years, I've listened to
a number of patients recount tales of humiliation in PE. The side
lines are fertile ground for developing the very sorts of issues that
exercise ameliorates.
liupwithsomethingwatching
Is. "When 1don't have time to
j:I know that a whole bunch of
ally stressed outI think, OK,
SPARK
Welcon
ffjilr.
the students remember ten facts about a partner after spending fif
teen minutes chatting.
Some kids who are socially timid never get a chance to learn
how to talk to people and make friends, so they retreat, especially
from the opposite sex. By not being singled out or relegated to a
way to approach someone, how close to stand, and when to let the
other person speak. Exercise serves as the social lubricant, and it's
SPREAD]
jr.
Their brains are primed by the movement, and they lay down cir
cuits that record the experience, which at first may be painful but
which becomes less so in the context of an experience shared by
the entire class. It's an intuitively brilliantway to bringkids out of
their shells, at a poignant age when everyone feels self-conscious.
30
i&Ssrg^iAazto&!E53E&
Zientarski puts them all in the same boat and gives them the tools
and encouragement to build up their self-confidence. The dancing
It's offerings like this, I believe, that explain why so many par
mother named Olfat El-Mallak has two daughters who went to
Madisonand then Central. "It'snot just physical exercise; it'ssome
thing else that happens inside of them," she says. "This is almost
like a motivational program. My girls believe in themselves. They
are bothvery confident about themselves, and they didn't start this
way. This is because of the PE program at District 203."
pier, and smarter. That is the ultimate goal of PE4life, the group
Lent, and they lay down cirich at first may be painful but
itof an experience shared by
SPARK
Welcome
classes to carve out time for daily gym. "It did not.cost usa cent to
do that," McCord says, noting that it was an administrator's sugges
tion."Andit's a huge move with No Child LeftBehindeverybody
else is going in the other direction."
NowTitusville's secondaryschoolshaveclimbing walls, and the
fitness centers are brimming with the latest training technology,
most of it donated. The Cybex Trazer, for instance, is a brand-new
device that looks like an upright computer station where students
chase flashing lights. There are also cycling trainers, which allow
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32
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itovernight. Thedistrict
her later. "She started to cry and couldn't believe the other kids
were cheering her on," McCord recalls. "Shesaid it helped her pull
herself up."
^administrator's sugges
t-Behindeverybody
tion in schools based on news that one PE4life school in the inner
(^instance, is abrand-new
iter- station where students
Stephanies of the world rather than just the football team, and
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